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Friday, May 30, 2014

Simple Knitting Tips: Where is Your Yarn??

I was peacefully knitting myself a pair of my (Mostly) Ridge Rib Socks one day, when I glanced down at my needles to see that the yarn was not where I thought it was, and consequently not where it should have been. And I thought, it's a good thing I caught this because it would have made a mess that would have been hard to trace, diagnose, and fix. And naturally it turned into a blog post. Naturally.

How many mistakes have been made--and could have been avoided--because our yarn was not where it should have been. This applies to both the working yarn and the tail yarn.

Some scenarios:

1. Knitting with the tail. One of the first things we teach beginners, yet seasoned veterans still find themselves doing this occasionally. Awkward.2. Working yarn is in the wrong place for knit stitch or purl stitch.

Yarn front to purl, yarn back to knit. Unless the directions say otherwise--in so many words.

3. Yarn in the cat's mouth. Pets and knitting is not always a happy mix. I have a friend who has cats who will dig in the knitting bag for yarn then run off with it. Needless to say, she has to use knitting bags with zippers!

4. Yarn caught in a dpn. This is what happened to spark this blog post. I was two stitches into the pattern on one needle and must have set the sock down and picked it back up and when I did, the working yarn had gotten wrapped around the needle not in use. Because the yarn was dark, (and the needles were, too, come to think of it), I didn't see what was going on immediately. My Spidey senses were tingling though and I've learned to pay attention to them. They were asking me, "Where is your yarn?!?!"

The "Yarn caught in dpn" issue, except with lighter yarn so you can actually SEE it!

5. Yarn wrapped too many times around the needle.Intentional yarn-overs are lovely things, aren't they? The unintentional kind are not. I've seen the yarn wrapped too many times before working the rest of the stitch as a result of paying too little attention to the process of the stitch. And maybe also a result of there being an adult beverage in range. Just maybe.

These are only a few examples--I would love to hear from you other scenarios so we can get the word out about this insidious problem. OK, maybe not insidious, but certainly pernicious, right?Also, the (Mostly)Ridge Rib Sock pattern is a free pattern, available to download from Ravelry HERE.

"...knitting is a great thing for young fingers: it teaches small-motor coordination, math, and especially, it teaches children to be calm, to sit and work at something in a quiet way." ~~~Ann Shayne, Mason-Dixon Knitting

"Knitting, he thought, was a comfort to the soul. It was regular. It was repetitious. And, in the end, it amounted to something."